DIstributed VIRtual System (DIVIRS) Project

The development of Prospero moved from the University of Washington to ISI and several new versions of the software were released from ISI during the contract period. Changes in the first release from ISI included bug fixes and extensions to support the needs of specific users. Among these changes was a new option to directory queries that allows attributes to be returned for all files in a directory together with the directory listing. This change greatly improves the performance of their server and reduces the number of packets sent across their trans-pacific connection to the rest of the internet. Several new access method were added to the Prospero file method. The Prospero Data Access Protocol was designed, to support secure retrieval of data from systems running Prospero

Vienna FORTRAN: A FORTRAN language extension for distributed memory multiprocessors

Exploiting the performance potential of distributed memory machines requires a careful distribution of data across the processors. Vienna FORTRAN is a language extension of FORTRAN which provides the user with a wide range of facilities for such mapping of data structures. However, programs in Vienna FORTRAN are written using global data references. Thus, the user has the advantage of a shared memory programming paradigm while explicitly controlling the placement of data. The basic features of Vienna FORTRAN are presented along with a set of examples illustrating the use of these features

Efficient processor management strategies for multicomputer systems

Multicomputers are cost-effective alternatives to the conventional supercomputers. Contemporary processor management schemes tend to underutilize the processors and leave many of the processors in the system idle while jobs are waiting for execution;Instead of designing faster processors or interconnection networks, a substantial performance improvement can be obtained by implementing better processor management strategies. This dissertation studies the performance issues related to the processor management schemes and proposes several ways to enhance the multicomputer systems by means of processor management. The proposed schemes incorporate the concepts of size-reduction, non-contiguous allocation, as well as job migration. Job scheduling using a bypass-queue is also studied. All the proposed schemes are proven effective in improving the system performance via extensive simulations. Each proposed scheme has different implementation cost and constraints. In order to take advantage of these schemes, judicious selection of system parameters is important and is discussed

Performance Evaluation of Specialized Hardware for Fast Global Operations on Distributed Memory Multicomputers

Workstation cluster multicomputers are increasingly being applied for solving scientific problems that require massive computing power. Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a popular message-passing model used to program these clusters. One of the major performance limiting factors for cluster multicomputers is their inefficiency in performing parallel program operations involving collective communications. These operations include synchronization, global reduction, broadcast/multicast operations and orderly access to shared global variables. Hall has demonstrated that a .secondary network with wide tree topology and centralized coordination processors (COP) could improve the performance of global operations on a variety of distributed architectures [Hall94a]. My hypothesis was that the efficiency of many PVM applications on workstation clusters could be significantly improved by utilizing a COP system for collective communication operations. To test my hypothesis, I interfaced COP system with PVM. The interface software includes a virtual memory-mapped secondary network interface driver, and a function library which allows to use COP system in place of PVM function calls in application programs. My implementation makes it possible to easily port any existing PVM applications to perform fast global operations using the COP system. To evaluate the performance improvements of using a COP system, I measured cost of various PVM global functions, derived the cost of equivalent COP library global functions, and compared the results. To analyze the cost of global operations on overall execution time of applications, I instrumented a complex molecular dynamics PVM application and performed measurements. The measurements were performed for a sample cluster size of 5 and for message sizes up to 16 kilobytes. The comparison of PVM and COP system global operation performance clearly demonstrates that the COP system can speed up a variety of global operations involving small-to-medium sized messages by factors of 5-25. Analysis of the example application for a sample cluster size of 5 show that speedup provided by my global function libraries and the COP system reduces overall execution time for this and similar applications by above 1.5 times. Additionally, the performance improvement seen by applications increases as the cluster size increases, thus providing a scalable solution for performing global operations

Overlapping of Communication and Computation and Early Binding: Fundamental Mechanisms for Improving Parallel Performance on Clusters of Workstations

This study considers software techniques for improving performance on clusters of workstations and approaches for designing message-passing middleware that facilitate scalable, parallel processing. Early binding and overlapping of communication and computation are identified as fundamental approaches for improving parallel performance and scalability on clusters. Currently, cluster computers using the Message-Passing Interface for interprocess communication are the predominant choice for building high-performance computing facilities, which makes the findings of this work relevant to a wide audience from the areas of high-performance computing and parallel processing. The performance-enhancing techniques studied in this work are presently underutilized in practice because of the lack of adequate support by existing message-passing libraries and are also rarely considered by parallel algorithm designers. Furthermore, commonly accepted methods for performance analysis and evaluation of parallel systems omit these techniques and focus primarily on more obvious communication characteristics such as latency and bandwidth. This study provides a theoretical framework for describing early binding and overlapping of communication and computation in models for parallel programming. This framework defines four new performance metrics that facilitate new approaches for performance analysis of parallel systems and algorithms. This dissertation provides experimental data that validate the correctness and accuracy of the performance analysis based on the new framework. The theoretical results of this performance analysis can be used by designers of parallel system and application software for assessing the quality of their implementations and for predicting the effective performance benefits of early binding and overlapping. This work presents MPI/Pro, a new MPI implementation that is specifically optimized for clusters of workstations interconnected with high-speed networks. This MPI implementation emphasizes features such as persistent communication, asynchronous processing, low processor overhead, and independent message progress. These features are identified as critical for delivering maximum performance to applications. The experimental section of this dissertation demonstrates the capability of MPI/Pro to facilitate software techniques that result in significant application performance improvements. Specific demonstrations with Virtual Interface Architecture and TCP/IP over Ethernet are offered